Concepts for a large scale car-sharing system: Modelling and evaluation with an agent-based approach

The increasing success of car-sharing worldwide – a system in which individuals participating in a specific program are allowed to use vehicles from a fleet on an hourly basis - should not hide the fact that it is still a niche product. This paper is aimed at renewing the debate on car-sharing and its future development. There is agreement that car-sharing produces benefits for the transport system, the environment and society. However, as shown in this paper, currently, the scale of such benefits is minimal. This is a reason to attempt the implementation of such a system at a much larger scale. A car-sharing scheme of this type is outlined and some concepts on which the system would be based are suggested. These are the capillarity of the system, its flexibility and its integration with other urban mobility tools. For the future implementation of such a scheme, finding a methodology that would be able to realistically assess its potential is crucial. This paper discusses the methodologies used so far to investigate car-sharing potential and explains why an agent-based approach has been chosen for this project. A framework for modeling a large-scale car-sharing scheme with such a methodology is proposed within the context of MATSim-T, an existing agent-based traffic micro-simulation tool